Talking Directly to Toddlers Boosts Their Verbal Skills

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Though toddlers are not yet fully developed as
conversationalists, talking directly to them could help
strengthen their vocabulary and language skills, according to a
new study. Overheard conversations and TV, meanwhile, don't do as
much for verbal development, the research suggests.

For their study, a pair of psychology researchers at Stanford
University examined what the world sounds like to 29 young
children from low-income
Latino families — a growing population in the United
States that is underrepresented in research and at risk for
academic difficulties, the team said.

Each 19-month-old wore a special shirt equipped with an audio
recorder that captured all the sounds he or she heard over the
course of a 10-hour day. Afterward, the researchers sifted
through the sounds to determine how many words were directed at
each kid, as well as how many words the kids simply overheard.
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The variation in verbal communication these toddlers
experienced was quite astounding. While 12,000 words were spoken
directly to one of the children during the day, another child in
the study heard just 670 words, the researchers said.

"That's just 67 words per hour, less speech than you'd hear in a
30-second commercial," study author Anne Fernald said in a
statement.

In follow-up tests five months later, when the children were 24
months old, the researchers tested the kids' vocabulary and
language processing skills. The kids who were spoken to more
often had larger vocabularies and could interpret words more
quickly than their peers who were exposed to less child-directed
speech from adults.

The findings, which were detailed last month in the journal
Psychological Science, suggest that simply overhearing speech is
not enough to boost kids' verbal skills early on in life.

"Mere exposure to speech directed to others or on TV is not
enough to drive early vocabulary development," the study's other
author Adriana Weisleder said in a statement. " Toddlers
learn language in the context of meaningful interactions
with those around them."

In some cases, the researchers said the mothers they spoke with
were unaware of how much they could help their kids learn, in
part because they had not received much education themselves. But
the team says their findings show that socioeconomic status does
not have to determine the quality of children's language
experience.

"Despite the challenges associated with living in poverty, some
of these moms were really engaged with their children, and their
kids were more advanced in processing efficiency and vocabulary,"
Fernald said in a statement.

The researchers say they are developing special games and
skill-building exercises to educate disadvantaged Latino families
about how to engage more effectively with toddlers.